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Reviewed by David Gellman | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 104.2 | The History Cooperative
104.2  
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June, 2008
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REVIEWS

Race to the Frontier
"White Flight" and Westward Expansion

By John V. H. Dippel
(New York: Algora Publishing, 2005. Pp xi, 337. Notes, selected bibliography, index. Cloth-bound, $28.95; paperbound, $22.95.)

John V. H. Dippel provocatively deploys the modern decampment of whites to the suburbs as an organizing metaphor for his argument that the desire to distance themselves from African Americans motivated successive waves of white "plain folk" to relocate ever farther westward. At the argument's core is a demographic genealogy of Free Soil ideology, the northern antebellum vision of the Midwest and trans-Mississippi territories as the dominion of free white farmers, whose material opportunities would be maximized and labor ennobled by the absence of slavery. Many Free Soil-ers were unapologetically racist, ascribing the degradations of slavery as inherent characteristics of all African Americans. Although Dippel's emphasis on the anti-black element of frontier development is buttressed by existing scholarship, his sweeping synthesis relies on too many partial inferences to be fully persuasive, let alone to reconfigure our understanding of either westward expansion or of Amer-ican racial ideology. . . .
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